A Sociologist's Soapbox: Researched Rants

          Red faced, teary-eyed, and excited, I read my acceptance letter to San Diego State University.  I could not believe it, in less than a year I would be living 2,600 miles away from home. As an 18 year-old I was filled with excitement, nervousness, and rebellion, so getting away from home was the greatest idea in the whole world.

           After the excitement died down, I started to wonder why I was so extremely excited to go to San Diego State University.  Was it the weather, the beaches, the always blue skies that produce tan skin beauty? Having grown up in Wisconsin my whole life, I envied the people of San Diego.  Except, ultimately, deep down, my drive to go to SDSU was more than just an endless summer for four years.

           I was motivated to attend SDSU because ever since I could walk I have wanted to be a doctor.  When I read about SDSU’s Biology program, I was sent into fantasies about working in a lab, learning more about chemistry, and ultimately getting one step closer to attending medical school.  

           San Diego State University has proved to be just as exciting as it was when I first received my acceptance letter in 2014.  I still wake up excited that I can wear shorts in January (while my parents are dressed in parkas) and I am even more excited for what my classes are going to teach me that day.  I feel truly honored to attend such an amazing institution.

When January 1st comes around each year the internet is filled with New Years resolutions, brand new engagements, and FAFSA jokes.  College students and their parents are swarmed with emails, phone calls, and flyers about when to file FAFSA, how to do it properly, and what you will get back in return. Thus, the long trek of filing out an application and anxiously awaiting to see what funding will be granted begins.

One tweet that particularly caught my eye this FAFSA season by @njavish that said, “Too rich for FAFSA, too poor for college tuition.” This sentence explains the problem that is facing many college students and their parents today. FAFSA is awarded based off of an individuals need for grants and loans to attend a higher-level institution—which sounded like a pretty reasonable system to me, until I started to file FAFSA for myself. What I realized was that although I was providing solely for myself (paying for college tuition, food, housing, insurance, etc.) the website only allowed me to put that I was a dependent to my parents, and therefore I had to file under my parents wage bracket. Filing under my parents wage bracket made it so that I didn’t qualify for any grants and only qualified for a small amount of money in loans.  What I was left with was almost $31,000 between how much money I was awarded with FAFSA, and how much I had to pay out of pocket for my first year of college. Obviously, the loans provided didn’t even come close to covering the full amount needed to attend school. 

So the obvious question I was asked was, “Well why didn’t you claim yourself as an independent on your FAFSA?” Well, the tricky part was that during my application, the series of questions I was asked to determine if I was an independent or a dependent seemed to be purposefully unattainable for an 18-year-old. The questions included:

1) Will you be 24 or older by Dec. 31 of the school year for which you are applying for financial aid?

2) Will you be working toward a master’s or doctorate degree?

3) Are you married or separated but not divorced?

4) Do you have children who receive more than half of their support from you?

5) Do you have dependents (other than children or a spouse) who live with you and receive more than half of their support from you?

6) At any time since you turned age 13, were both of your parents deceased, were you in foster care, or were you a ward or dependent of the court?

7) Are you an emancipated minor or are you in legal guardianship as determined by a court?

8) Are you unaccompanied youth who is homeless or self-supporting and at a risk of becoming homeless?

9) Are you currently serving on active duty in the U.S. armed forces for purposes other than training?

10) Are you a veteran of the U.S. armed forces? (Dependency Status, 2013).

After answering these questions, I was left to believe the only thing I could do to become an independent to gain more money in financial aid was to click the box pertaining to at a risk of becoming homeless, because truthfully, I was.  

Since there is such a lacking amount of money that is given in financial grants, aid and scholarships, it is estimated that 60% of students earning bachelors degrees graduate with $26,500 in debt (Lewin, 2012). Because FAFSA does not help me with my college expenses I am forced to work two jobs and try to attend school full time in the hopes of not graduating with almost $27,000 in debt. My college experience has been affected by the hours I have to work because I am not always able to study as much for exams or attend office hours of professors due to a conflicting work schedule.  Even with working as many hours as I work, I fall short of the total amount of money required to pay for a four-year bachelor’s degree.  This problem is not an individualistic problem, rather it can be attributed to a structural problem. As the picture depicts, buying a gun is easier than affording my education.  Let’s make that the new FAFSA joke.  

Lewin, T. (2012). Student-loan borrowers average $26,500 in debt. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/education/report-says-average-student-loan-debt-is-up-to-26500.html?_r=0

Dependency Status. (2013). Federal Student Aid. Retrieved from https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/fafsa/filling-out/dependency#dependent-or-independent

How do we become who we are? Why do little girl’s generally get bought pink items, while little boys get purchased blue toys? How do men learn to be tough, but women learn to be fragile? Some may say nature, while others will battle for nurture.  Either way, the general term for how we become who we are is called socialization (Newman, 2015).  Whether we like it or not, we have been socialized from before we were born.  The moment your parents announced whether you were going to be a boy or a girl socialization happened.  If you were a girl, maybe your neighbor bought you a pink onesie, or your mother bought you a doll set.  If you were a boy, perhaps your grandpa bought you a floatable boat, or your uncle bought you a toy truck.  These are small examples of things that led to us becoming socialized.

        In today’s society women are expected to be more nurturing to their children, while men are expected to attend to tasks such as mowing the lawn, or fixing the sink (Newman, 2015). Simply because certain toys were bought for you to play with when you younger resulted in the fact that we were all pushed towards a set of gender norms. Therefore, no matter what we do, we are being socialized.  Different events in your life will socialize you in different ways. If you’re a woman and scrape your knee you are allowed to cry and scream and feel pain, but if you’re a male and you scrape your knee you’re expected to “rub some dirt in it” and move on. Without socialization, men in the previous scenario should have cried out in pain if they were hurt too. Therefore, the fine line between nature and nurture is drawn.  Is it a man’s nature to not show pain when he is hurt? Do men have a higher pain tolerance than women or are they socialized into not showing their emotions so they can appear, “manly”? I believe the answer is both to any question that asks whether nature or nurture causes something to happen.         There are many reasons I believe that we are who we are because of nature and nurture. For example, many people would agree that intelligence is nurture.   That if you “work hard enough” you can be as smart as anyone else, however; studies have shown that your genes put you into a certain “bracket” of intelligence, meaning you can only be so as smart or dumb as your genes allow you to be (Licht, Hull, & Ballantyne, 2014). After that, nurture takes over and determines how high you can go on that bracket, allowing for greater success than other family members and so forth.         Another example that proves we are not just nature or nurture are the tests performed on identical twins reared apart.  If the argument were that intelligence is completely based upon your DNA, than this study would shown both of the twins having the same IQ. Except, the study showed that the twins had different IQ levels. Therefore, nature had to come into effect to produce two different people who have the same genetic makeup. (Licht, Hull, & Ballantyne, 2014).         These two studies and the example given above are all reasons that I have to believe that humans are a mix of both nature and nurture. A female does not just gravitate towards cleaning and cooking, just as a male doesn’t gravitate towards cutting the lawn.  From young on we have been socialized into the people we are today, with booming personalities, odd quirks, and brilliant minds.  

Licht, D., Hull, M., & Ballantyne, C. (2014). Scientific American: Psychology. London: Worth Publisher.

        Oliver shines light onto one of the most debated topics in the United States today, the gender wage gap. Oliver informs the public about a lot of interesting arguments about the gender wage gap in America. One of the most fascinating topics about the gender wage gap to me was that Obama said he would fix it during his presidency, and it has remained the same.  It is amazing that women in the white house are still allowing to be paid less than men doing the same job.  I would expect women in a higher position as such to fight for equal rights more than they have.

            Have you ever owned a 90 year-old car?  Let’s say you do still own a Model-T Ford from 1926, and it’s sitting in your driveway right now. Do you think it would actually run? And, say that it actually does run....do you think it needed repairs along the way and could run as well as a 2016 Chevy Cobalt—probably not.  Similarly, as humans age, they can not partake in the same forms of physical exercises that they once did because of the current condition of the bodies that being alive for 90 years does to a person. For example, 66% of women older than 90 years-old have osteoporosis, a common medical disease where the growth of new bone is slower than the decaying of old bone which causes significantly higher fatalities from bone fractures every year (What is osteoporosis?, 2015). Therefore, if a 90 year old brings their 3 year-old granddaughter to a park, they might rest on a bench as their granddaughter plays on the swings or they might go on the swings themselves.  There is no law set to segregate the elderly from playing on a swing set, or to stop the toddler from sitting on the bench.

        Shulamith Firestone’s book, “Down With Childhood” challenges the social structures and segregation of our society today based on socialization.  Her argument poses that benches, parks, and secluded areas are forms of age segregation.  I firmly disagree with that statement, based upon my one explanation of growing older in the previous paragraph.  Further in her argument she states that once a person is of childbearing age they rarely have contact with children, or have been removed from contact with children for a long time.  Considering 24% of the United State’s population is under the age of 18, it seems a bit unlikely that every person who has reached child bearing age has no contact with children (United States, 2014).

        Additionally, Firestone argues that children are in horrible places in their lives because they have to be financially dependent upon their parents.  Let’s take a look at birds for a moment.  Bird’s often use regurgitation—the vomiting of partially eaten food into another’s mouth as a form of nutrients—to survive while pregnant.  The male bird will eat enough food for the pregnant female bird and then regurgitate it to her while she is still keeping her eggs warm (Hendrickson, 2016). Without this sort of dependency in nature, the bird race could cease to exist. Female birds would not get the proper nutrients they need in order to stay warming their eggs.  Similarly, if parents were to not provide financially for their children, the human race would cease to exist, because children a year old do not have the capabilities to provide food for themselves. 

        The memories I have of childhood do not resonate with Firestone’s argument about children.  I disagree with childhood being hell as she explains it. Stating that dependency leads to a childhood of hell is very drastic.  Every waking minute of childhood isn’t hell, just as every waking minute of college isn’t fun. There are parts in every day that are fun and parts that aren’t fun.  Every stage of life whether that be adolescence or adulthood encompass moments of absolute bliss and moments of absolute hell. If saying that dependency to another is hell than several other parts of our universe would have to be examined.  For example, biologically, animals must be dependent upon their mothers once born.  Without the dependence and help from mothers, birds may not figure out how to fly, and humans may not figure out how to provide for themselves in terms of food, clothing, and shelter.  Animals demonstrate exactly what humans do with their young, for example orangutans provide for their young for two years, never breaking contact with the mothers skin before they are allowed to slowly accomplish tasks on their own (Harness, 2011). I would be as bold to say that humans are one of the mammals that care the least about the children and dependency.

        Dependency is necessary for any species to continuing involving in the wild, whether that species is the bumblebee or the human race. My 2000 Jeep wrangler doesn’t run the way a 2016 Maserati does, hence why it needs more oil changes, more repairs, and more time spent tinkering around under the hood.  Children are not oppressed; they are merely growing up as any other mammal in the wild does.

 Harness, J. (2011). The 8 best mothers in the animal kingdom. Neatorama. Retrieved from http://www.neatorama.com/2011/05/07/the-8-best-mothers-in-the-animal-kingdom

Hendrickson, A. (2016). Regurgitation: bird term of the day. Bird Channel. Retrieved from http://www.birdchannel.com/bird-words/regurgitation.aspx

United States. (2014). United States Census Bureau. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/00

         The obvious first sentence here should be an introductory sentence.  But if I were to break the rules, it might start something like this: “Lunch is better after I smell my foot fungus.” Now this may seem silly, comical, or even satirical, but let this be a first example to the importance of rules, not only in writing—but in our society.  For this answer to make any sense, I have to follow a set of rules, including diction, grammar, language, punctuation, and syntax, among others.  Similarly, in society we have a set of rules to follow that govern the sensibility of everyday citizens.

         I would argue that rules are put in place to help maintain a society that functions properly. For example, without rules we could drive as fast as our cars allow, or as slow as the soundtrack of our junior high slow dances. For many commuters the ability to drive as fast as they please may sound delightful, except with the ability to drive at different speeds on the freeway it could lead to detrimental accidents happening quite often.  For example, there are 1,601 fatalities per year that take place because a driver ran a red light (Lombardo & Subramanian, 2007) Similarly, there are 1,574 fatalities from drivers who ran stop signs (Lombardo & Subramanian, 2007) and that is just a simple rule in our society.

        Other rules that are put in place to help maintain a functioning society are rules that govern vaccinations. If a child between the ages of 4-6 is put into a public elementary school, they must obtain these shots: diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, hepatitis, measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella (State Vaccination Requirements, 2015). If they are not given these shots prior to the first day of school they are not allowed to attend.  I believe a rule regarding immunizations in a school environment is absolutely crucial to the well being of our society. These immunizations are what have stopped and what have helped to prevent such immense diseases and epidemics in the world.  Most people are aware of how fast a common cold can spread through a germ infested kindergarteners room, but without vaccinations, polio could spread just as easily.  

        At this point, anyone reading this post would have been able to make sense of the words I have written, thanks to the rules of writing.  In an effort to be a law-abiding writer the only way to properly conclude this entry is with an uplifting quote, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”

Lombardo, L., & Subramanian, R. (2007). Analysis of fatal motor vehicle traffic crashes and fatalities at intersections, 1997 to 2004. U.S. Department of Transportation, 8(72), 1-121.

        “What do you want to be when you grow up Tessa?”

        “A Doctor.”

        “Do you know how much you have to work when you’re a doctor, Tessa? Almost 80 hours a week!  And you have to be on call on the weekends, and in the evenings, and even on your birthday.”

        “Oh, I didn’t know that.”

        From early on in our lives we are forced to start thinking about what we want to do when were older what job we want to have when we are older. Speaking for myself, I’ve never been asked WHO I want to be when I’m older. My answer to that question would be very different than “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  I would have answered with, “A best-friend, a wife, a mother, a lover.” I would never have responded with what job I want to do for the rest of my life.

        I agree with LaFargue’s argument about shortening the work week for several reasons. It is too often while I am at work at Trader Joe’s that I see my managers (most of them parents) working 10 to 11 hour shifts per day.  They come to work before their children are up, and get off work as their children are going to bed.  They are being robbed of the most valuable times in their children’s lives to form connections and to raise them. I also believe the work week should be shortened to allow people to enjoy their lives more.  If you spend your whole life at work waiting for the moment you can finally enjoy your life you, what kind of life is that?

        I believe that technology is a beneficial form of reducing the average workday.  Although, I do not believe it is the only way to help decrease the average day.  I believe shortening the time department stores and offices are open could also help decrease the time people spend at work each day.  By closing an hour earlier, the employees would benefit by being able to go home an hour earlier as well.           I am sick of hearing my coworkers talk about how they watched their children’s dance performance on their smartphone instead of being in the audience themselves.  I want them to be able to pick their child up from school, and I want free time to relax for everyone else as well.